What is DevOps and why is it important?
Many teams are now making the move to DevOps, and there is a good reason: using DevOps practices helps enable teams to be more responsive to market changes. They can deploy code more quickly and more safely, and with less fear of breaking production. But switching to DevOps is not an either/or proposition…
DevOps is a mindset
Benefits include maximizing automation with efficiency, optimizing the entire business, improving speed/stability and most importantly, gets you to focus on what matters most; people.
Cultivate a DevOps team environment, before buying all the tools
DevOps is the latest in a long succession of problem-solving processes that each come with a digital garage full of tools: CI/CD systems, testing frameworks, monitoring tools, and security audit tools to name a few. But applying a DevOps mindset before tool adoption is essential.
Before moving to DevOps, ensure your team is aligned on the following:
- Everyone is on the same page with respect to what you’re trying to achieve with this transformation. Everyone should agree on the problem you’re trying to solve, and that you are aligned on the pain points.
- Start small. Don’t try to make the entire organization into a model DevOps team overnight. Instead, start with one team, and see if the process changes work within your organization.
- Always measure. Before you start any improvement plan, get accurate metrics for where you’re currently at (i.e. our dev cycle takes X time). Then once you’ve implemented changes, you can measure their effectiveness.
- Do not try to automate everything at once. One misconception about DevOps is that all the infrastructure provisioning and configuration management must be done automatically. Try automating the building and testing of your application before automating sophisticated deployment scenarios.
- Choose for Scale. When you decide to make the leap and begin to incorporate tools/solutions into your operational stack, make sure that the tools can scale and grow natively, ensuring that collaboration and/or performance does not recede as your team grows over time.
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Get DevOps buy-in from management
Getting your manager to say ‘yes’ to new DevOps tools can be challenging. Use the following tips to approach getting new tooling approved:
- Emphasize the problem, not the tool. Before any conversation begins, we need to identify the action item. No manager wants to have meetings that don’t have actionable insights.
- Use relevant data to support your need. Developers are pros at generating data, so include some specific stats in your ask.
- Get buy-in from your team’s least likely fan. It is important to loop in others who are going to be affected and who are likely to have opinions about the new tool.
- Demo the tool and invite questions. Ask your team if they see any issues down the road that introducing the tool may create.
